Essay 2: Masculinity and Emphasized Femininity Performances in Mulan PDF

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The Task
Choose ONE text that exists within the popular media.
Discuss how gender and sexuality, are presented within this text.
Refer to relevant theory from weeks 5-7 to support your discussion.
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Examples of a ‘text’ existing within the popular media:...

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Hegemonic Masculinity and Emphasized Femininity Performances in Mulan ‘Mulan’[ CITATION Ban98 \l 3081 ] is a Disney animated movie that teaches young children about gender roles. It uses a plot with a soundtrack that exposes the idea of gender roles and ideologies and essentially proves that emphasized femininity or hegemonic masculinity is unachievable. Hegemonic masculinity is understood as the pattern of practice that maintain men’s dominance over women to continue [ CITATION Con05 \l 3081 ]. Emphasized femininity is the pattern of femininity which is given most cultural support and involves patterns such as compliance and sociability to men [ CITATION Cur13 \l 3081 ]. The story takes place during the Han Dynasty in China and is centred around a female character named Mulan – her purpose at the beginning of the film is to bring honour to her family by marrying a suitable husband. However, when the Emperor decrees that one man from every household must be drafted into the military to prepare for a Hun invasion, she fears that her wounded father will not survive the war. Mulan disguises herself as a man takes her father’s armour to start training with fellow recruits. The songs; Honor To Us All, I’ll Make A Man Out Of You and A Girl Worth Fighting For, all reveal the rigid gender roles within the society and the conflict Mulan feels when trying to achieve either emphasized femininity or hegemonic masculinity. This essay will prove that ‘Mulan’ (1998) uses a soundtrack to develop a story that successfully displays how hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity are difficult to perform and how both maintain a patriarchal society. It will firstly define gender, gender identity, gender roles and discuss hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity. Secondly, it will examine how the songs ‘Honor To Us All’ and ‘A Girl Worth Fighting For’ display two sides of a patriarchal society that perpetuate practicing emphasized femininity as a gender role to maintain patriarchy.

Lastly this essay will then discuss

how the lyrics of ‘I’ll Make A Man Out Of You’ reflects how hegemonic masculinity is unable to be achieved by all men – resulting in in power relationships between genders and within genders.

Gender is the most significant part of the film – throughout the movie in different circumstances, Mulan must perform female and male gender roles to successfully bring honor to her family. Gender is not a fixed or normative construct we are born with; it is a habitual performative construct rooted in society [ CITATION Dem011 \l 3081 ]. Gender is “the product of a sequence of practices and characteristics which have over time become labelled as masculine or feminine” [CITATION Mil12 \p 12 \l 3081 ]. Everyone has a gender identity; how a person views him or herself in relation to masculinity and femininity and how they use this view to affect how they conform or resist socially ascribed gender roles [ CITATION Lea14 \l 3081 ]. These gender roles, taught through gender

socialization, prescribe what women and men should do and how they should act in order to be accepted by society in terms of behaviour, career, fashion and parenting [ CITATION Lea14 \l 3081 ]. Gender ideologies typically enforce hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity. Hegemonic masculinity associate’s men with ‘naturally’ rational, efficient, intelligent, powerful, ambitious and aggressive behaviour traits [CITATION Mil12 \t \l 3081 ]. Emphasized femininity “centres on women’s compliance with subordination and the accommodation with men’s interests and desires” [CITATION Mil12 \p 20 \t \l 3081 ] therefore being ‘naturally’ motherly and driven by emotion. Gender roles and ideologies are important concepts to apply to the text as the movie uses songs with blatant statements of what society expects a woman and man to be.

The song ‘Honor To Us All’ introduces Mulan to the demands of the role expected of women in a patriarchal society. It plays early on in the story during Mulan’s prepping scene to meet the town’s matchmaker to be a bride for a potential husband. While the ladies dress her, Mulan is clearly uncomfortable with the idea of emphasized femininity. Mulan exhibits non-stereotypical behaviour as the song plays with scenes where Mulan quickly figures out how to win a game of checkers for two old men, stops two little boys from bullying a little girl as well as falls behind the line of the other women who are encountering the matchmaker. The matchmaker essentially sees all these actions as negative traits and measures a Mulan’s success by how well she can attend to the needs of a husband. While Mulan is preparing to meet the matchmaker, the ladies who are helping her dress sing:

“A girl can bring her family great honor in one way, by striking a good match and this could be the day / Men want girls with good taste, calm, obedient, who worked fast-paced, with good breeding and a tiny waist. You’ll bring honor to us all / We all must serve our Emperor, who guards us from the Huns, A man by bearing arms, a girl by bearing sons” The song ends with Mulan entering the matchmaker’s office in which she cannot meet the expectations of a suitable woman for a husband. Mulan returns home and struggles to connect with her expected role in society – she is bound to a task by her gender and it is a task she cannot accomplish [ CITATION Can14 \l 3081 ]. The lyrics of this song showcase a feminine perspective on the demands Mulan must meet to bring honor to her family. The women in the town and even Mulan’s grandmother sing that she must be calm, obedient, beautiful and live a life that accommodates and cares for men and children in order to bring honor to her family. As the song states that women have the role to serve men, it perpetuates the ideals of a patriarchal society. By giving women the gender role of having children and men bearing arms, it takes away the chance for women to have any type of structural power as all the powerful positions will be taken by men. Therefore, the emphasized femininity displayed in the song ‘Honor To Us All’ is a product of patriarchy that is widely accepted because it helps to maintain patriarchy by encouraging women to fill social roles [CITATION Mil12 \t

\l 3081 ]. . The song ‘Honor To Us All’ showcases the emphasized feminine gender ideology Mulan and other women in the film must fulfil in order to serve their fathers, future husbands and emperor – therefore maintaining the power of patriarchy and men within their society as shown from a female perspective. ‘A Girl Worth Fighting For’ plays later on in the film during the journey to join the front line and serves the purpose to introduce Mulan with a male perspective of how feminine gender roles act to serve men’s needs. The song goes on for the men in the army to list what they want in a girl including looks, abilities and thoughts.

“I want her paler than the moon, with eyes that sine like stars / My girl will marvel at my strength, adore my battle scars / I couldn’t care less what she wears or what she looks like, it all depends on what she cooks like”

These lyrics showcase men bringing their idea of a perfect woman which correlates to the expectations shown within the song ‘Honor To Us All’. The desire for a beautiful, adoring, obedient and domestic wife is consistent with the expectations of fulfilling emphasized femininity. Mulan sings a line to describe an ideal girl in her mind “How about a girl who’s got a brain, that always speaks her mind?” in which the other soldiers reply simataneously “Nah!”. Mulan struggles to relate to the men’s ideology of what an ideal woman is as she is a woman herself who is not similar in any way. When she sings that a woman who is smart and outspoken is ideal, the men immediately find her unusual. Men have already prescribed certain characteristics as appropriate for men and on the same basis rule out others as inappropriate (Milestone & Meyer, 2012) so Mulan is seen as unusual for desiring a trait in women that embraces them as individuals. These preferences men hold for a woman are a result of their gender socialization over their life in a patriarchal society (Leavy & Trier-Bieniek, 2014). The idea of patriachy and oppression of women is perpetuated within their family, jobs and social life and therefore the soldiers repeat the cycle and desire an ‘ideal’ woman who performs emphasized femininity and is essentially an object of desire. The song ‘A Girl Worth Fighting For’ showcases how gender roles expected from women are perpetuated by men in order to meet their needs and maintain the patriarchal power they hold in society.

‘I’ll Make a Man Out of You’ is a song that embodies the counterpart to emphasized femininity – hegemonic masculinity. The song develops the narrative by revealing what is expected of a man and shows the audience that Mulan may not be able to perform masculinity at the training camp. The song is sung by Captain Li Shang addressing his incompetent soldiers during a rigorous training routine. The song immediately addresses what a man should be; swift, forceful, strong and mysterious. The song is played behind a series of activites requiring those qualities - in which Captain Li Shang

perfects all of them. He embodies the currently most honored way of being a man – hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). The song continues to show Mulan and the other soldiers struggling to keep up with Captain’s Li Shang’s expectations of hegemonic masculinity while the line “Be a man” repeats itself in the song. The soldiers have poor perfromance and sing:

“I’m never gonna catch my breath, say goodbye to those who knew me. Boy was I fool for cutting gym. This guy’s got them scared to death. Hope he doesn’t see right through me. Now I really wish I knew how to swim”.

Hegemonic masculinity is not normal in the statistical sense – only a minority of men might enact it [ CITATION Con05 \l 3081 ]. This means that not only Mulan is struggling to perform masculinity, but so are all the cisgender men struggling to “be a man”. This results in all men positioning themselves in relation to the person who performs hegemonic masculinity as they are the embodiment of what it means to be a true man (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Therefore, he has power over them and states that in order to survive, they must follow him – and they submit. However, Mulan has the poorest performance and has to deal with the fact that not only does she not meet the expectations of the feminine gender role, but she does not perform well within a masculine role. The song’s structure echoes Mulan’s struggle as the last lines of each verse go from, “I’ll make a man out of you,” to, “Somehow I’ll make a man out of you,” to, “How could I make a man out of you?” (Canastra, 2014). Mulan is eventually dismissed to go home as she cannot perform hegemonic masculinity but wanting to prove herself, she completes a challenge that no other soldier in the camp could complete. It required strength and discipline and she embodied what it meant to be a hegemonic man in order to complete the training and have hegemonic masculinity. “I’ll make a man out of you” is a song that showcases examples of hegemonic masculinity and men who cannot perform it to demonstrate how power relationships involved within a gender and between genders come to be within a patriachal society.

In summary, this essay has proven that ‘Mulan’ (1998) successfully utilizes a soundtrack to display a narrative that showcases emphasized femininity and hegmonic masculinity as gender ideologies that are difficult to achieve as well as used to maintain a patriachal society. The songs ‘Honor to Us All’ and ‘A Girl Worth Fighting For’ show two sides of societal expectations for how a women should act and also introduces Mulan to the demands she needs to meet to perform emphasized femininity – a feat she cannot fulfill. The song ‘I’ll Make a Man Out of You’ showcases the meaning of hegemonic masculinity and how Mulan and other cisgender men struggle to meet the expectations of a the masculine gender role. The soundtrack for Mulan essentially shows that while emphasized femininity and hegemonic masculinity perpetuate the patriachal system, they are gender ideologies that cannot be realistically fulfilled by individuals as people of all genders struggle to meet the expectations of their

gender roles. In conclusion, patriachy is maintained by emphasized femininity and hegemonic masculinity through subordination of women to men’s needs but it is important to understand that the two gender ideaologies are difficult to peform in relation to our own personal gender identities.

References Bancroft , T., & Cook, B. (Directors). (1998). Mulan [Motion Picture]. Canastra, A. (2014, May 14). I'll Make a Cultural Analyst Out of You: a Close Reading of the Mulan Soundtrack.

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https://culturalresearchers.weebly.com/studies/ill-make-a-cultural-analyst-out-of-you-a-closereading-of-the-mulan-soundtrack-ashley-canastra Connell, R. W., & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005, Dec). Hegeminic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept. Gender and Society, 19(6), 829-859. Currier , D. M. (2013). STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY: Protecting Emphasized Femininity and Hegemonic Masculinity in the Hookup Culture. Gender and Society, 27(5), 704-727. Dematrakis, D. Z. (2001, Jun). Connell's Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique. Theory and Society, 30(3), 337-361. Leavy, P., & Trier-Bieniek, A. (2014). Introduction to Gender & Pop Culture. In P. Leavy, & A. TrierBieniek, Gender & Pop Culture (pp. 1-25). Rotterdam: SensePublishers. Milestone, K., & Meyer, A. (2012). Gender and Popular Culture. Polity Press.

Appendix A Movie synopsis: During the Han Dynasty in ancient China, the Great Wall fails to keep out the dangerous Hun army and their ruthless leader, Shan Yu. The alarm is raised, and the Emperor mobilizes an army to protect China. Fa Mulan, the teenage daughter of respected war hero Fa Zhou, nervously prepares for her meeting with the village matchmaker. Mulan is clever, kind-hearted but has little faith in her ability to perform as a poised and beautiful bride. She meets her mother and grandmother in town to be bathed and dressed before joining the other girls at the matchmaker’s house. Mulan’s grandmother insists Mulan take a cricket with her for good luck but the cricket escapes and causes trouble for Mulan. She is deemed a disgrace and is told she will never bring honor to her family. Deeply ashamed, Mulan returns home and laments that she is not the daughter her parents deserve. The Emperor’s councilman arrives at Mulan’s village to draft one man from each family for the imperial army. Mulan watches in fear as young men are called forward to receive their orders, knowing that her aging and weak father will be called up as well, being the only male member of the Fa family. As Fa Zhou is called, Mulan pleads for her father to be excused from battle, as he is already a veteran with an injured leg. Fa Zhou reprimands her for her meddling and insists he will go to training camp the next day with the other soldiers. Mulan makes the desperate decision to steal her father’s armour and impersonate a soldier in order to save her father’s life. Fa Zhou and Fa Li awaken and discover with horror that their daughter has left to join the army. They cannot go after her, for impersonating a soldier is a capital offense, and Mulan would be executed if her identity was revealed. Grandmother Fa prays to their ancestors to protect Mulan. The ancestors decide to send the Great Stone Dragon to save her but a smaller dragon, Mushu, decides it is his time to prove himself worthy and he sets off to save her. Mulan is really not much of a soldier and struggles to act masculine, but with her fellow beginners, Yao, Ling and Chien-Po, they all gradually learn how to become a warrior under the guidance and instruction of Captain Li Shang. Mushu wants to see Mulan succeed and sends a fake instruction from the Captain's father, General Li, telling him to bring his men to the mountains to act as reinforcements; however, when they arrive, they find the camp has been raided and the imperial army massacred. Captain Shang, who sees his father’s helmet lying amongst the bodies, sadly leads the reinforcements away. As they leave, they are ambushed by the Huns who have been waiting for them. Mulan uses a canon to cause an avalanche which buries the Huns and kills them, but Shan Yu survives; he slashes Mulan in the chest. When the wound is bandaged her deception is revealed and although under Chinese law she must be killed for impersonation, Captain Shang spares her life because she has saved his. However, she is banished from the army and the Captain leads his men

further up the mountain without her. As Mulan is trying to decide how she will get home, she sees Shan Yu heading for the Imperial City. She warns Captain Shang, but he does not believe. The Huns capture the Imperial Palace and take the Emperor prisoner; Mulan helps Yao, Ling and Chien-Po to disguise themselves as concubines and gain entry into the palace. Captain Shang also enters with them and together they defeat Shan Yu's men. Shang stops Shan Yu from personally assassinating the Emperor, and Mulan tricks him into chasing her onto the roof of the palace. They engage in hand to hand combat until Mushu, on Mulan's instruction, fires a skyrocket directly at the leader of the Huns. The rocket hits him squarely in the stomach so hard that it propels him into a tower room where fireworks are stored. There is a huge explosion and he is finally killed. Mulan is a hero; the Emperor awards her his crest and she is also given Shan Yu's armour. She is offered the position of Advisor to the Emperor, but she politely turns it down, requesting instead that she be allowed to return home to her family. Her request is granted and when she arrives, she gives her father the awards she has received. Shortly, Captain Shang arrives at the home, ostensibly to return her helmet, but he has become rather smitten with Mulan and wants to see her again; returning the helmet was an excuse to do so. Mulan's family invite him to stay for dinner, which he readily accepts. During the celebration that ensues, Mushu is reinstated as a Fa family guardian by the ancestors who are very proud of him.

Link to the movie trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsAniqGowKE...